Eating leftovers of love

I’m sitting across and I can feel the table shaking.

The phone rings and as she picks up, I begin to dust off the hurt by slowly rolling my shoulders. 

“I don’t know,” I tell my therapist. “I just have a feeling”– 

“What feeling?” he asks.

I revisit the memory and she’s looking at me out of love and out of loyalty.

“That feeling….”

It stings to blink. I’m spinning around in my own heart. This is annoying.

“What feeling Mija?” he asks again. 

“As a kid, whenever hurt was happening or in the air and nobody seemed to care–

I would always think Someone should be outraged about this! You do matter. I believe you. That’s not the point–don’t you see it?”

I hold my cheeks in place feeling as hot and pink as my ears. “I wanted it all to go away–to be taken away from all that.”

It burns to know my place. “I understand everything and I’m so tired of it.” 

“You live in a world inside you,” my therapist says. 

My hands drop down. “What?” 

“Someone like you–you live a different kind of life. Why do you polish your emotions so much?”

“Because I’m a writer.” 

“Ahhh that you are.” 

“That I am huh.”  I pinch myself in thought.

“And what do you do with so much emotion?” 

“I roll it like a lemon. I try to squeeze it with a tool and then with my hands.” I let this out like it’s a secret I’ve been holding in my whole life.

Disappointment from a friend is a lot different from being burned by a lover. I want to scratch off this memory. This irreplaceable piece of existence in the friendship. 

You shouldn’t realize how much I love you the moment I’m asking you to treat me better.

I’m crying and I want to leave. 

I want off the way I want to come down after a bad trip. 

I want off the same way someone realizes they’re on the wrong train.

I want to scratch this moment off from the ticket of love and win myself another place in time. 

I got so close to the situation I think I’m on the other side of it. 

I performed way too many autopsies and I don’t even like blood. 

I’m lying on the grass and the sky is gray. 

I’m holding my cold cup of coffee but the thing is– I don’t even like coffee. I don’t even like you. 

I’m scabbed and bruised, sitting with my back behind a cemetery’s grave. 

But the flowers I think. 

I need a confession. 

I bring my head down.

“How much can someone change and get away with it?” My therapist asks. 

“Get away with it?”

“Get away with it til it’s murder,” he adds.

I roll my eyes. 

“I’m just trying to get you to think about it. You don’t know what’s good for you because you die about love. People change and you always stay the same.”